Chapter Three examines the University of Chicago’s Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations (CETRRR), which sociologist Louis Wirth established in 1947 to produce and ...
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Chapter Three examines the University of Chicago’s Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations (CETRRR), which sociologist Louis Wirth established in 1947 to produce and disseminate research on race relations. Although the university’s sociology department had been the institutional home of Robert Park’s social ecology, the leading systemic approach to race relations in the 1920s and 1930s, concern with prejudice and the interpersonal sources of racial tensions received considerable attention at CETRRR between 1947 and 1952. Nonetheless, arguments over the relationship between white attitudes and the “general situation” in which race relations developed divided CETRRR researchers. These debates emerged forcefully in both discussions of a “tension barometer,” a survey research instrument intended to predict urban racial violence before it occurred, and in CETRRR affiliates’ efforts to promote better race relations in the Chicago Public Schools. However, both methodological considerations associated with the refining of individualistic survey research techniques and reformist concerns related to preventing wartime racial violence discouraged critics of racial individualism from elaborating alternative approaches.Less

The Individual and the “General Situation” : Defining the Race Problem at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations

Leah N. Gordon

Published in print: 2015-05-20

Chapter Three examines the University of Chicago’s Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations (CETRRR), which sociologist Louis Wirth established in 1947 to produce and disseminate research on race relations. Although the university’s sociology department had been the institutional home of Robert Park’s social ecology, the leading systemic approach to race relations in the 1920s and 1930s, concern with prejudice and the interpersonal sources of racial tensions received considerable attention at CETRRR between 1947 and 1952. Nonetheless, arguments over the relationship between white attitudes and the “general situation” in which race relations developed divided CETRRR researchers. These debates emerged forcefully in both discussions of a “tension barometer,” a survey research instrument intended to predict urban racial violence before it occurred, and in CETRRR affiliates’ efforts to promote better race relations in the Chicago Public Schools. However, both methodological considerations associated with the refining of individualistic survey research techniques and reformist concerns related to preventing wartime racial violence discouraged critics of racial individualism from elaborating alternative approaches.

Chapter Four looks closely at arguments about the significance of prejudice to the race problem in a center of African American intellectual life that aimed explicitly to use social science to inform ...
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Chapter Four looks closely at arguments about the significance of prejudice to the race problem in a center of African American intellectual life that aimed explicitly to use social science to inform political strategizing: Fisk University’s Race Relations Institutes (RRI). The yearly, three-week summer conferences that sociologist Charles S. Johnson initiated in 1944 at one of the nation’s leading historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) show that racial individualism faced substantial challenges in some postwar intellectual arenas. At the same time, the RRI’s history exposes dilemmas associated with politically engaged social science. While political economic and social structural theories of the race issue endured in the late 1940s at the RRI, Institute participants increasingly embraced both psychological and rights based individualism in their political agendas, regardless of the theories they espoused.Less

The Mature Individual or the Mature Society : Social Theory, Social Action, and the Race Problem at Fisk University’s Race Relations Institutes

Leah N. Gordon

Published in print: 2015-05-20

Chapter Four looks closely at arguments about the significance of prejudice to the race problem in a center of African American intellectual life that aimed explicitly to use social science to inform political strategizing: Fisk University’s Race Relations Institutes (RRI). The yearly, three-week summer conferences that sociologist Charles S. Johnson initiated in 1944 at one of the nation’s leading historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) show that racial individualism faced substantial challenges in some postwar intellectual arenas. At the same time, the RRI’s history exposes dilemmas associated with politically engaged social science. While political economic and social structural theories of the race issue endured in the late 1940s at the RRI, Institute participants increasingly embraced both psychological and rights based individualism in their political agendas, regardless of the theories they espoused.

A case study of the Rockefeller Foundation’s evolving approach to research and reform on the race issue, the second chapter reveals the crucial role postwar philanthropists played in encouraging ...
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A case study of the Rockefeller Foundation’s evolving approach to research and reform on the race issue, the second chapter reveals the crucial role postwar philanthropists played in encouraging racial individualism. The chapter assesses how antiradicalism, scientism, and behavioralism helped narrow the terms of debate on racial questions within Rockefeller philanthropy from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. The RF encouraged substantial activist involvement in scientific agenda setting, considered HBCUs necessary participants in racial research, and supported multi-disciplinary approaches to the race issue, especially prioritizing political economic analysis, in the late 1920s. By the early 1950s, in contrast, foundation leaders retreated from increasingly contentious racial politics, weathered anticommunist attacks, embraced behavioralism, and prioritized scientism and theory generation. As a result, the RF either disengaged from the race issue altogether or treated it as a small subset of larger theoretical interest in “human relations.” Though some scholars within the RF orbit, most notably sociologists Robin M. Williams Jr. and Arnold Rose, encouraged the foundation to challenge tendencies towards “atomism” in research on race, the RF largely ignored their suggestions.Less

“Data and Not Trouble” : The Rockefeller Foundation and the Social Science of Race Relations

Leah N. Gordon

Published in print: 2015-05-20

A case study of the Rockefeller Foundation’s evolving approach to research and reform on the race issue, the second chapter reveals the crucial role postwar philanthropists played in encouraging racial individualism. The chapter assesses how antiradicalism, scientism, and behavioralism helped narrow the terms of debate on racial questions within Rockefeller philanthropy from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. The RF encouraged substantial activist involvement in scientific agenda setting, considered HBCUs necessary participants in racial research, and supported multi-disciplinary approaches to the race issue, especially prioritizing political economic analysis, in the late 1920s. By the early 1950s, in contrast, foundation leaders retreated from increasingly contentious racial politics, weathered anticommunist attacks, embraced behavioralism, and prioritized scientism and theory generation. As a result, the RF either disengaged from the race issue altogether or treated it as a small subset of larger theoretical interest in “human relations.” Though some scholars within the RF orbit, most notably sociologists Robin M. Williams Jr. and Arnold Rose, encouraged the foundation to challenge tendencies towards “atomism” in research on race, the RF largely ignored their suggestions.

This chapter argues that a superior sociology of race relations containing a great deal more analytic accuracy and predictive power could have been developed if DuBois's conceptualizations of race ...
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This chapter argues that a superior sociology of race relations containing a great deal more analytic accuracy and predictive power could have been developed if DuBois's conceptualizations of race had guided the field. DuBois completely and unequivocally rejected the thesis of Blacks' inferiority. In all of his work he attacked the accepted sociological wisdom by hammering against the presumption that Blacks were subhuman, existing outside the human fold. By assuming that Black people were full members of the human family shaped by history, culture, and social structure, DuBois constructed a realistic sociological picture of Black people. Because he saw Black people as a distinctive and creative group, he also rejected the widely held view of white sociologists that Blacks' only salvation was assimilation. As a result of rejecting both the inferiority and assimilation theses, he produced unique cultural and structural analyses of Black people, their institutions, movements, culture, leaders, shortcomings, and capabilities.Less

Sociology of Race and W. E. B. DuBois: The Path Not Taken

Aldon D. Morris

Published in print: 2007-03-01

This chapter argues that a superior sociology of race relations containing a great deal more analytic accuracy and predictive power could have been developed if DuBois's conceptualizations of race had guided the field. DuBois completely and unequivocally rejected the thesis of Blacks' inferiority. In all of his work he attacked the accepted sociological wisdom by hammering against the presumption that Blacks were subhuman, existing outside the human fold. By assuming that Black people were full members of the human family shaped by history, culture, and social structure, DuBois constructed a realistic sociological picture of Black people. Because he saw Black people as a distinctive and creative group, he also rejected the widely held view of white sociologists that Blacks' only salvation was assimilation. As a result of rejecting both the inferiority and assimilation theses, he produced unique cultural and structural analyses of Black people, their institutions, movements, culture, leaders, shortcomings, and capabilities.

Communities across the United States appear to turn to intergroup dialogues on race out of a need to pursue social justice as well as, if not more than, out of a desire to foster individual ...
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Communities across the United States appear to turn to intergroup dialogues on race out of a need to pursue social justice as well as, if not more than, out of a desire to foster individual self-actualization. The politics of unity would predict that instead of talking about race relations, people would choose to build bridging social capital by working together on a common project, in a cooperative, not combative fashion. Pursuing talk about race is also a bit of a mystery because public talk is not easy. This chapter examines why individuals choose to implement dialogue groups and analyzes what their reasons suggest about the functions and uses of such groups. To help demystify this complex political action, the chapter focuses on the explanations individuals offer during in-depth interviews. It turns to Joe Soss's work on participation in the U.S. welfare system for a model of such an analysis. Building on Murray Edelman's work on symbolic politics, Soss investigated the reasons people gave to explain their decision to apply for welfare benefits.Less

Choosing the Action of Talk

Published in print: 2007-05-15

Communities across the United States appear to turn to intergroup dialogues on race out of a need to pursue social justice as well as, if not more than, out of a desire to foster individual self-actualization. The politics of unity would predict that instead of talking about race relations, people would choose to build bridging social capital by working together on a common project, in a cooperative, not combative fashion. Pursuing talk about race is also a bit of a mystery because public talk is not easy. This chapter examines why individuals choose to implement dialogue groups and analyzes what their reasons suggest about the functions and uses of such groups. To help demystify this complex political action, the chapter focuses on the explanations individuals offer during in-depth interviews. It turns to Joe Soss's work on participation in the U.S. welfare system for a model of such an analysis. Building on Murray Edelman's work on symbolic politics, Soss investigated the reasons people gave to explain their decision to apply for welfare benefits.

This book is about the late night basketball leagues organized in dozens of American cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s for purposes of social intervention, risk prevention, and crime reduction ...
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This book is about the late night basketball leagues organized in dozens of American cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s for purposes of social intervention, risk prevention, and crime reduction among African American youth and young men. The first chapters trace the historical origins and evolution of these programs set in the context of the social policy transformations of the era. As the chapters unfold, the book also analyzes the racial ideologies, cultures of sport, and policy debates that midnight basketball reveals and that endowed it with larger symbolic significance and political import. Ethnographic fieldwork is used in the final chapters to bring the actual, on-the-ground practices of midnight basketball programs and the young men they were intended to serve to life. Throughout, Midnight Basketball offers a nuanced understanding of the complicated and consequential ways in which sports, race, and risk intersect in contemporary American culture.Less

Midnight Basketball : Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy

Douglas Hartmann

Published in print: 2016-07-29

This book is about the late night basketball leagues organized in dozens of American cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s for purposes of social intervention, risk prevention, and crime reduction among African American youth and young men. The first chapters trace the historical origins and evolution of these programs set in the context of the social policy transformations of the era. As the chapters unfold, the book also analyzes the racial ideologies, cultures of sport, and policy debates that midnight basketball reveals and that endowed it with larger symbolic significance and political import. Ethnographic fieldwork is used in the final chapters to bring the actual, on-the-ground practices of midnight basketball programs and the young men they were intended to serve to life. Throughout, Midnight Basketball offers a nuanced understanding of the complicated and consequential ways in which sports, race, and risk intersect in contemporary American culture.

The trials of the war years, the constant pressure of being caught between intransigent bosses and, in Weaver's view, unrealistic activists, took their toll prompting his resignation from the War ...
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The trials of the war years, the constant pressure of being caught between intransigent bosses and, in Weaver's view, unrealistic activists, took their toll prompting his resignation from the War Manpower Commission. His departure marked a major turning point in Weaver's career, beginning a decade in which he moved almost constantly from job to job in search of a place where he could best use his talents. Weaver's first foray into his new world came in Chicago, a city that was physically and metaphorically at the center of the new regime of American race relations. From World War I through the end of World War II, the city saw its black population skyrocket, as hundreds of thousands of southern blacks boarded trains for what they called the “Promised Land.” Weaver's years in Chicago marked the emergence of a new “science” of race relations: the development and implementation of theories positing that racial antagonism was primarily the result of ignorance. Though the theories took years to fully develop and were attacked as soon as they were formulated, their foundational principle was that, with careful direction from professionally trained experts, racial groups could learn to live in harmony.Less

Chicago and the Science of Race Relations

Published in print: 2008-10-01

The trials of the war years, the constant pressure of being caught between intransigent bosses and, in Weaver's view, unrealistic activists, took their toll prompting his resignation from the War Manpower Commission. His departure marked a major turning point in Weaver's career, beginning a decade in which he moved almost constantly from job to job in search of a place where he could best use his talents. Weaver's first foray into his new world came in Chicago, a city that was physically and metaphorically at the center of the new regime of American race relations. From World War I through the end of World War II, the city saw its black population skyrocket, as hundreds of thousands of southern blacks boarded trains for what they called the “Promised Land.” Weaver's years in Chicago marked the emergence of a new “science” of race relations: the development and implementation of theories positing that racial antagonism was primarily the result of ignorance. Though the theories took years to fully develop and were attacked as soon as they were formulated, their foundational principle was that, with careful direction from professionally trained experts, racial groups could learn to live in harmony.

Since the early 1990s, more than 400 cities across the United States, and many cities throughout the world, have implemented programs such as intergroup dialogues in which diverse groups of ...
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Since the early 1990s, more than 400 cities across the United States, and many cities throughout the world, have implemented programs such as intergroup dialogues in which diverse groups of volunteers are recruited to come together over repeated sessions to talk about race and address the issue of race relations. There are many reasons to be skeptical of this form of public talk. And yet the fact remains that many people in many communities around the country are turning to it. Examining what they are actually doing with these dialogues on race brings us closer to understanding the nature of deliberative democracy. And it also sheds light on yet another pressing topic in contemporary civic life: how to create bonds across social divides. In recent years, this has been called the problem of creating bridging social capital. Although this “bridging” social capital is notoriously difficult to create, many claim that it is crucial for heterogeneous democracies.Less

Race, Dialogue, and the Practice of Community Life

Published in print: 2007-05-15

Since the early 1990s, more than 400 cities across the United States, and many cities throughout the world, have implemented programs such as intergroup dialogues in which diverse groups of volunteers are recruited to come together over repeated sessions to talk about race and address the issue of race relations. There are many reasons to be skeptical of this form of public talk. And yet the fact remains that many people in many communities around the country are turning to it. Examining what they are actually doing with these dialogues on race brings us closer to understanding the nature of deliberative democracy. And it also sheds light on yet another pressing topic in contemporary civic life: how to create bonds across social divides. In recent years, this has been called the problem of creating bridging social capital. Although this “bridging” social capital is notoriously difficult to create, many claim that it is crucial for heterogeneous democracies.

The love of deliberative democracy runs deep in the United States. The myth of the Lincoln-Douglas debates expresses nostalgia for a time of vigorous civic involvement that never actually occurred, ...
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The love of deliberative democracy runs deep in the United States. The myth of the Lincoln-Douglas debates expresses nostalgia for a time of vigorous civic involvement that never actually occurred, and romantic images of New England town meetings overlook the grittiness of the exchanges that actually take place. Even intergroup dialogues display behavior that is not simply brotherly love or a striving for mutual understanding. This book has shown that cities throughout the United States are using public talk to address race relations. In these intergroup civic dialogue programs, small racially diverse groups of volunteers come together over repeated sessions to talk face-to-face about race. This dialogue is intended to enable listening to the perspectives of others in the community as a way to improve understanding.Less

Beyond Romance and Demons

Published in print: 2007-05-15

The love of deliberative democracy runs deep in the United States. The myth of the Lincoln-Douglas debates expresses nostalgia for a time of vigorous civic involvement that never actually occurred, and romantic images of New England town meetings overlook the grittiness of the exchanges that actually take place. Even intergroup dialogues display behavior that is not simply brotherly love or a striving for mutual understanding. This book has shown that cities throughout the United States are using public talk to address race relations. In these intergroup civic dialogue programs, small racially diverse groups of volunteers come together over repeated sessions to talk face-to-face about race. This dialogue is intended to enable listening to the perspectives of others in the community as a way to improve understanding.

New waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America are transforming the United States from a country that is monochromatically divided between blacks and whites into a multiethnic society composed ...
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New waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America are transforming the United States from a country that is monochromatically divided between blacks and whites into a multiethnic society composed of at least four sizeable ethnic groups: whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. However, race remains an important social issue, as seen in the high levels of segregation of racial groups by neighborhood and municipal boundaries. This book examines racial segregation, racial attitudes, and neighborhood life in an increasingly multiethnic United States. Drawing on data compiled from the census and four national surveys, it compares the racial attitudes of the country's four major racial groups and considers how these attitudes vary across different types of racial environment. The book argues that the country's patterns of spatial and social integration present some fundamental paradoxes for the future of its race relations, including the paradoxes of diversity and community. It concludes by assessing the implications of these findings in light of America's changing demography and debates over multiculturalism.Less

Introduction: Place and the Future of American Race Relations

Published in print: 2010-05-01

New waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America are transforming the United States from a country that is monochromatically divided between blacks and whites into a multiethnic society composed of at least four sizeable ethnic groups: whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. However, race remains an important social issue, as seen in the high levels of segregation of racial groups by neighborhood and municipal boundaries. This book examines racial segregation, racial attitudes, and neighborhood life in an increasingly multiethnic United States. Drawing on data compiled from the census and four national surveys, it compares the racial attitudes of the country's four major racial groups and considers how these attitudes vary across different types of racial environment. The book argues that the country's patterns of spatial and social integration present some fundamental paradoxes for the future of its race relations, including the paradoxes of diversity and community. It concludes by assessing the implications of these findings in light of America's changing demography and debates over multiculturalism.